July 30th

Developers and critics alike have been discussing important games from the past this week, covering the gamut from Flash games to Far Cry 2. Meanwhile, newer cultural hits such as Dream Daddy and 17776 are having a big impact.

Tend and befriend

Lots of people are talking about Dream Daddy, but it isn’t the only thing getting games writers talking about queer optimism; in other pieces, games critics use feminist futurisms to find new ways of reading games.

“Brie Code, programmer, writer and all-round inspirational human, recently wrote about “tend-and-befriend” as an emotional response to stress. Unlike fight-or-flight, this response limits the release of adrenalin. “Your body releases oxytocin or vasopressin when you’re stressed, followed by opioids. This calms your sympathetic nervous system,” Code describes. […W]hen games are so geared towards getting that sweet adrenalin rush, what are those of us who prefer tend-and-befriend supposed to do? “

Dark confines

This week’s writing on spaces in games has tended to hint at different ways that spaces reflect and influence the people who use them.

“Befitting the mood of a final frantic push towards victory, the last segment of map takes place within the dark confines of Eichenwalde Castle. It tosses the battle into an extended sequence of close quarters combat in a dark, gloomy space. Ceilings are lower, side paths more winding, and the defending team’s spawn point deposits them almost directly onto the final capture point. Eichenwalde becomes more hostile in visual tone and construction.”

Collaborators

In two pieces, developers discuss their experiences working on important games in the past.

“I can see Behold the Kickmen spawning a tangential sub-genre of titles that tackle things the authors don’t understand but want to. Done the right way we might see a lot more games that put the fun back into the dull, or ridiculous. And when I say “dull” I just mean things I don’t quite understand yet. Like most people feel about football. “

Thematically-rich tedium

Looking more broadly at narrative technique, these four pieces are retrospectives that consider major games from the past ten years or so in light of genre conventions and what we now understand about their developers’ goals as creatives.

Dishonored’s Party Level Rewrote the Rules of Stealth Games (Spoilers for Dishonored)GB Burford argues that Dishonored is different because it is open to many styles of play – but along the way, goes further than this, showing that the game uses narrative complexity to construct daring choices that run counter to the assumptions of how stealth works.

Spec Ops The Line… 5 Years Later – YouTube (video: auto-captions. Spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line)Raycevick summarises the history of Rockstar Vancouver, and finds all kinds of hidden gems to build up an argument about how foreshadowing and disorientation are used to narrative ends in this much-discussed title.

“There is an impulse when evaluating anti-shooters to celebrate […] deliberate, thematically-rich tedium. This is an erroneous stance, in part because most anti-shooters aren’t actually tedious. Spec Ops: The Line is a good shooter. Kane and Lynch 2 is a good shooter[…] I don’t mean to be prescriptive here and say that tedium is never meaningful or valuable; I ask only that we dispel the notion that tedium is somehow intrinsic to the anti-shooter.”

Inhabit the skin of the monstrous

Four writers this week look at how games portray and respond to mental states; including a piece from Waypoint’s special week on incarceration, that considers the metaphorical prisons of the mind.

“critical fantasies of escape are essential to resistance against this carceral rhetoric. If the dungeon equates the imprisoned to the monstrous, then pieces like howling dogs, Begscapeand With Those We Love Aliveask us to inhabit the skin of the monstrous, the grotesque, the pitiable. The empathy is with the kobolds hiding and scurrying, the gelatinous cubes crawling the corridors.”

Intentionality

Finally, I was startled to find these two pieces that both consider intentionality as a part of game design thinking, but in completely different ways.

“if the player refuses to cooperate without sufficient emotional investment in the choice, something is lost in Reza’s character development. The designers had to create a narrative design that would make the player chose non-cooperation intentionally.”